Here, you are urged and encouraged to run your mouths about something important.

Friday, November 25, 2011

Obama Doubles Down on Support for OWS

When Barack Obama initially expressed support for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, they hadn't yet racked up thousands of arrests and millions of dollars in damages. With the passage of time, the OWS movement has become a political liability for the administration. Obama's relative silence may have been perceived as a tacit admission that the administration should distance itself from the miscreants.

That perception would be wrong. Obama has come out and publicly re-expressed his support for OWS.

When Occupy protesters interrupted his Nov. 22 campaign trail speech at a high school in Manchester, N.H., President Barack Obama declared that, “Young people like the ones here today, including the ones who were just chanting at me —you’re the reason I ran for office in the first place.”

Obama’s unscheduled Nov. 22 endorsement of the Occupy protesters broke his deputies’ month-long silence on the increasingly controversial group.
For almost six weeks, Obama’s officials had not endorsed the groups’ actions, offering only bland answers when asked by reporters for comment.

The movement garnered much favorable media coverage in October, prompting initial endorsements in mid-October by Obama and his two leading election advisers.

But since then, the Occupy encampments have been the scenes of several murders, rapes, diseases, assaults and riots.

This re-endorsement may be very troublesome but remember what uncle Saul Alinsky says in rules #7 and #8:

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag. Commitment may become ritualistic as people turn to other issues.

Rule 8: Keep the pressure on. Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period for your purpose. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.”

As for Rule #7, Van Jones expressed to CNN earlier this month that the strategy for OWS was to change the tactic, to shift away from 'anger' and lawlessness to the political arena of elections. To this point, the protesters don't seem all that much interested in doing that.
This could be telling Obama the ideologue that the current OWS tactics have not yet become a drag, which leads us to Rule #8; it starts out with the words, 'Keep the pressure on.'

While this may be a miscalculation on the part of Obama, it might just tell us that he has nowhere else to go, that attempting to change the direction of OWS is too monumental, that this movement is all he has left, and that his only option is full investment.

Juxtapose Obama's continued support for the lawless OWS crowd with Gabrielle Giffords' husband implying that Sarah Palin had some culpability when it came to his wife's shooting.